Anyone else tracking Week 72 labs against NCT04184622?

2026-08-26 8581 views 41 posts

I'm 72 weeks into my own tracking and finally read the NCT04184622 design closely: 2539 participants, placebo vs tirzepatide 5 mg, 10 mg, and 15 mg, primary period Week 0-Week 72. The raw data I found has no outcome numbers, which surprised me.

So I'm curious how others here track beyond scale weight-waist, fasting glucose, lipids? I keep a simple spreadsheet, but I'm not sure it's signal or noise. What has actually been useful for you over a long run like 72 weeks?

I track waist and fasting glucose. Scale stalled; waist didn't.

Waist moving while scale stalls is why I kept my spreadsheet going.

Common surprise when people start comparing trials: the lab schedule. Case in point, NCT06897475 — LY3457263 vs placebo in T2D, and it's specifically for people already on stable semaglutide or tirzepatide. 200 participants, still recruiting.

The visit and draw schedule on that one is intense — a lot stacked up, which is the part that quietly eats your calendar.

Intense how? I looked at NCT07382024 for AF ablation, not yet recruiting, 200 people. No doses listed, so not useful for lab tracking.

Week 38 here and I ditched daily weigh-ins for Sunday waist at the navel plus one pair of old jeans as the real test. My spreadsheet is just weight and waist, while sleep and steps live in my phone. The jeans got loose before the scale moved.

Curious whether your Week 72 labs are truly fasting or just drawn whenever you can get in?

Scale stayed flat for 11 days, then whoosh after a salty weekend. Water weiht is a troll.

I tracked sleep and stress for 14 weeks and my waist moved more than my weight. The surprise was that my resting heart rate dropped 6 bpm before the scale budged at all.

Weekends were the tell: Friday takeout added 2-3 lb by Monday and it was gone by Wednesday. What finally made the spreadsheet useful was switching from daily entries to weekly averages and tagging high-stress weeks instead of pretending they were normal.

I kept my usual breakfast and added a 30-minute walk after dinner plus 2 liters of water before noon. If you're 72 weeks in, maybe keep waist plus one lab you actually care about and drop the rest for a month to see what tracks.

Honestly, I'd push back on treating the trial design as the map for your own tracking. Your n=1 is the only dataset that changes your behavior. I track waist and a monthly photo in the same bathroom light, with fasting glucose every three months.

That photo caught shoulder and back changes at week 52 when the scale was stuck. What made you kep the spreadsheet this long?

I'd add a monthly mirror photo in the same outfit; my spreadsheet missed shape changes completely.

One pair of jeans beat every column: I went down two belt notches before the tape agreed.

I dropped daily weigh-ins around week 16 because the noise made me nuts; a 4-week rolling average caught a 0.4 lb/week trend that single days hid. The surprise was my fasting glucose barely moved while my resting heart rate dropped 7 bpm over 3 months.

Now I log waist and one jeans fit monthly, and that combo beats a giant spreadsheet.

Weekends were my blind spot: waist Sunday morning, same tape, before coffee, showed a half-inch jump after Friday takeout. I didn't count calories, just swapped takeout to every other Friday and added a 20-minute walk after dinner.

The weird part: scale barely changed for six weeks while the tape kept creeping down 0.25 inch a month.

My resting heart rate ended up being the quietest signal — 74 in week 6, 63 by week 48, and it moves 3-4 bpm before the scale budges.

Reversal though: my worst stretch, weeks 55-59, had nothing to do with food. It was a work deadline and five-hour sleep. Logging that made the spreadsheet finally make sense. Do you track sleep at all, or just the numbers you listed?

Gently disagreeing — lipids and fasting glucose barely move quarter to quarter, so 72 weeks of them can look like flat noise even when things are working. What tracked for me was a stair test: 6 flights, same shoes, timed. Went from 3:10 to 1:55 by week 60.

Cheaper than a lab draw and way more sensitive to whether I'm actually moving.

Water weight wrecked me for months — one restaurant dinner showed +3 lbs by morning.

The thing that finally made my spreadsheet readable was anchoring to one meal instead of one metric. Same weekday breakfast, and I only compare week-to-week trends.

Boring part: my weight sat in a 2 lb band for 11 weeks, then dropped 5 in nine days with zero change in what I ate. That gap is why I stopped panicking at plateaus.

Waist tape beat the scale for me: down 5 inches by week 68 while the scale sat flat for five straight weeks.

I added sleep hours to my sheet around week 40 and it was the first column that actually moved in tandem with my waist. Weeks under 6 hours, I'd hold 2-3 pounds of bloat and my resting heart rate jumped 4-5 bpm. Not causation, but it made the noise look a lot less random.

Honestly I'd push back on needing more columns — one pair of jeans gave me more signal than a year of numbers. Bought a 16 at week 10, hit a 10 around week 55, and the weeks my waist stalled were exactly the weeks the jeans got looser anyway. Bodies remodel before the tape agrees.